Sharing your ideas with the right people helps make them better. The more feedback I get on an idea, the better I am able to nurture it and execute it in a useful way.
Nobody’s going to steal your idea
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#82This is pure nonsense. Please, please, please stop talking about ideas. What people steal --and the only thing with huge value-- are MARKET OPPORTUNITIES. Ideas are easy to generate. Everyone has loads of them. When an idea is combined with the work necessary to identify if a market opportunity exists it can become invaluable. Ideas are not stolen because an idea, all by itself, does not identify whether or not anyon…
What you refer to as market opportunity is also commonly considered to be an idea. For example, lets say you find a group of folks willing to pay $1,000 for widgets that cost pennies because you discovered that (a) they don't know about these widgets and (b) it solves a major painpoint. Both are considered ideas.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#83This is pure nonsense. Please, please, please stop talking about ideas. What people steal --and the only thing with huge value-- are MARKET OPPORTUNITIES. Ideas are easy to generate. Everyone has loads of them. When an idea is combined with the work necessary to identify if a market opportunity exists it can become invaluable. Ideas are not stolen because an idea, all by itself, does not identify whether or not anyon…
"Ideas" and "market opportunities" sort of go hand in hand, don't you think? The market opportunity is assumed when someone talks about an idea for a business.
Yes, and validating the assumption of a market opportunity is called finding product-market fit. Failing to do so is a leading cause of death among startups. An actual market opportunity, not an assumed one, is certainly valuable - which is why a VC will invest in it where they wouldn't invest in just an idea.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#84This is pure nonsense. Please, please, please stop talking about ideas. What people steal --and the only thing with huge value-- are MARKET OPPORTUNITIES. Ideas are easy to generate. Everyone has loads of them. When an idea is combined with the work necessary to identify if a market opportunity exists it can become invaluable. Ideas are not stolen because an idea, all by itself, does not identify whether or not anyon…
completely agree with this argument. I really like the authors argument that when the time is right many people will have the same idea at the same time. copying an idea is trivial, copying the execution, the stamina, the bravado to get shit done, and the balls to get other people to follow - significantly more difficult
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#85I feel like one point that is missing in this conversation is that sometimes when you don't talk to people about your ideas you miss out on a lot!
I frequent a lot of technical mixers in the region and I talk to a lot of people about their ideas (and sometimes about my ideas). Not to mention validation (how many people get excited about your idea), but there are a lot of helpful criticism or leads to be found by telling people your idea.
There were a ton of folks that, after having heard what they were doing, I was able to point them to similar entries in the field ("your idea sounds really similar to this existing site, but they're different because of X") or to tools that could help them ("hey, have you heard of twilio/stripe/etc, because that could help you bootstrapped quickly", or "hey, you should talk to X, he's actually working on related topic and could give you some insight").
If you're some huge company (Apple, Facebook, Google) you already have a huge pool of internal brains to pick. If you're one lone entrepreneur on a mission, I'd say you benefit a lot more from telling good people about your idea than it is to stay mum about it.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#86This is pure nonsense. Please, please, please stop talking about ideas. What people steal --and the only thing with huge value-- are MARKET OPPORTUNITIES. Ideas are easy to generate. Everyone has loads of them. When an idea is combined with the work necessary to identify if a market opportunity exists it can become invaluable. Ideas are not stolen because an idea, all by itself, does not identify whether or not anyon…
"Ideas" and "market opportunities" sort of go hand in hand, don't you think? The market opportunity is assumed when someone talks about an idea for a business.
[deleted]
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#87An obvious counterexample is sittercity/care.com "On July 20, 2006, Sheila Marcelo and Nick Beim flew from Boston to Chicago to visit a company called Sittercity. The business, which charged parents to access an online database of sitters and nannies, had been launched in Boston five years earlier. “We took the meeting to talk about an investment,’’ says Genevieve Thiers, the Boston College alumnae who founded Sitter…
Do you really think "babysitters, online" is a novel, protectable idea? And regardless, to start a company you have to let people know what your company does . You can't just say "give us money, we can't tell you why but it's totally worth it". So the idea has to be released eventually. What would you have had them do differently? These guys were around for 5 years and somebody else beat them within 3 months? That's…
There was fare more discussed in that meeting than just "babysitters, online". They where in bushiness for 5 years and could easily answer things like 'What's the most useful way to do background checks?'. Which is not 'just an idea', but a validated and valuable one.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#88This is pure nonsense. Please, please, please stop talking about ideas. What people steal --and the only thing with huge value-- are MARKET OPPORTUNITIES. Ideas are easy to generate. Everyone has loads of them. When an idea is combined with the work necessary to identify if a market opportunity exists it can become invaluable. Ideas are not stolen because an idea, all by itself, does not identify whether or not anyon…
What you refer to as market opportunity is also commonly considered to be an idea. For example, lets say you find a group of folks willing to pay $1,000 for widgets that cost pennies because you discovered that (a) they don't know about these widgets and (b) it solves a major painpoint. Both are considered ideas.
> What you refer to as market opportunity is also commonly considered to be an idea.
Nope. Wrong.
The idea in your example is: "I want to make a widget that does x".
The opportunity is: "I made some widgets that do x and 100 people bought them at $1,000 each during the last 30 days".
An idea without an opportunity is: "I made some widgets that do x and I only found one person during the last 30 days who said they'd be willing to pay $50 for it".
Another idea is: "Let's make a website that allows employers to keep track of employee productivity"
The opportunity might be: "We built a prototype of a website that allows employers to keep track of employee productivity, showed it to ten companies and two of them bought licenses for $2,000 per month".
The lack of opportunity might look like this: "We built a prototype of a website that allows employers to keep track of employee productivity, showed it to ten companies and none of them saw enough value to even test it for free".
In other words, opportunities represent a very direct link to actually having a real business that can scale and grow.
Go ahead, quit your job and take idea number two above. Spend three months developing a prototype. No clue if there's a market opportunity there. It's probably worth millions. Maybe.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#89I don't agree. Mainly because I don't agree with the premise that ideas are worthless - something that is echoed around all the time. Ideas being worthless is the lazy and easy way to explain to someone why they should get feedback on their idea. The reality is ideas do have value. We've got a great idea for a new product, and we're not telling anyone about it. That's because our idea has value and we don't want anyo…
> Mainly because I don't agree with the premise that ideas are worthless - something that is echoed around all the time. I don't know the genesis of this, but the first time I heard it was in an interview with John Doerr a number of years ago. And from a VC's perspective, that makes sense. They don't want to invest in an idea; they want to invest in something that has traction. From a startup's perspective, though, i…
It's always business people who say that ideas don't matter, without any indication of the conflict of interest involved in that statement. It shifts the balance of power if the opportunity can be transposed to a separate business, or to separate people. A businessperson knowing an idea commodifies the technology, which doesn't happen when they're tied to an implementation or black box.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ideas that big companies will never execute - because throwing 5000-20000$ per month might be simply not worth that. Recommended reading: The Bootstrapper's Bibles
What if my idea is big? Should I just hope they won't take it from me?
I see several option:
1) double check your idea. I have not come to any unique idea of my own that is not implemented yet or not in implementation stage. In some cases implementations are really poor but still they exist.
2) You have some know-how what makes implementation of your idea successful. They can steal your idea but they will fail to implement it successfully (some comments in this discussion give example of this).
Let's say your idea is really big and you implement it first. So what? If it is really good to be copied they will copy it faster than you will get your first paying customers.